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Whooosh!
The liquid stream turned into a ba
"Many good-byes, you sons of bitches!" he roared after them.
Exultation brought a flush to his face as Pamela carefully raised the flamethrower and plunged the muzzle into a big metal tub of water lashed to the side of the railcar. The crews broke into cheering as well, hopping up and down and hammering each other on the back.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Ken said. "You going to let them get away?"
They dove back to the throwing engines. Ken hopped back to the deck of the bridge. Two of Pamela's A-lister guards saluted him; he eyed them with some surprise. Not that the Outfit's elite had ever treated him with anything but respect; he was the bossman's father-in-law, and Eric's father, and Pamela's husband, for that matter. He'd been there from the begi
But those salutes were a little different:
"What?" he said to them. "It was Pamela who toasted that boat."
They gri
"So: " the other continued, and they both saluted again.
He shook his head in wonderment, then looked up sharply at a hammer of hooves on the westward end of the bridge. A military apprentice was there; the youngster's horse didn't want to come onto the bridge, with its uncertain footing and stink of chemicals and hot metal and burning, for which he didn't blame it. Instead Larsson walked over, noticing that the hauberk was starting to get seriously unpleasant.
"Yes?" he said. Uh-oh. That's a serious-news face, if I've ever seen one.
"My lord, the Lord Bear's compliments, and get your teams hitched."
"We lost?" Ken said sharply, looking over to his right. The battlefield wasn't visible from here, but they'd heard some noise.
"No, my lord. We beat off their attack and sent them ru
"Pyrrhos of Epiros," he said. "Thank you: message acknowledged, will prepare for departure."
He turned, thinking through the orders necessary to get his railcars headed south once more; he might not be a soldier, but scheduling was something he was good at.
One of the A-listers who'd saluted him said: "Pyrrhos? Who's that, Lord Ken?"
"A Greek general who fought the Romans," he said, which apparently satisfied the man's curiosity.
And who's most famous for beating a Roman army at hideous cost and then exclaiming: "Another victory like this, and we're ruined!"
His eyes went east over the river. His daughter Astrid was there, and good friends, and they were fighting the Protector's men too.
There are just too damned many of them! Damn Corvallis anyway. Can't they see that if we go down, they're next?
Chapter Fifteen
Near Mount Angel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9
S ir Nigel Loring whistled silently to himself as he looked up at the walls of Mount Angel through the binoculars. Even with his slightly damaged eyes and by moonlight, even to someone who'd seen castles throughout Europe and helped rebuild more than one in England, they looked daunting. And in this light it seemed otherworldly as well, the pale whitewash shining as if carved from a single opal and lit by some internal glow.
The hill that held the monastery rose steeply half a mile northward from this patch of woods, nearly five hundred feet at its ridgelike top above the flat farmland that surrounded it; the whole mass of earth and rock was shaped like an almond, ru
Someone was very ingenious, he thought. But then, I'm told that they have an excellent library.
The walls were curved in a smooth oval, following the four-hundred-foot contour around the hillside, leaning back with a very slight camber. Building them must have been fairly simple; cut back into the hillside until the earth behind was a vertical bank as high as you wanted, and then build the wall up against it; the construction method looked like mass-concrete, big rocks set in a matrix of cement. The walls were not only thick in themselves; they were backed up by the whole intervening mass of the hill, millions of tons of solid earth and rock.
You couldn't knock them down, not without functioning pre-Change artillery or explosives. Even if there was no opposition, he doubted present-day technology could tear them down without thousands of laborers and years of effort. The towers that studded the circuit of the curtain were built out from the wall itself, starting about thirty feet up and swelling out from the surface; they were probably steel-framed. He could see the roofs of some of the buildings inside the curtain over the crenellations and hoardings, but that wouldn't matter much-with that height advantage, throwing engines inside could dominate everything for a mile around, smashing enemy catapults like matchboxes, and they'd be nearly impossible to knock out by anything trying to loft missiles back at them.
There was little or no cover on the slopes below, either; everything had been trimmed back to knee-height or less, the dirt from the excavations used to make the slopes smoothly uniform and nowhere less than forty degrees from the vertical, and some tough, low-growing vine planted to hold the surface. If things were arranged anything near to the way he'd do it, the defenders could toss heavy stone shot or pump flaming oil at any spot. The skin at the back of his neck crawled at the thought of trying to lead a storming party to the base of the walls.
And if you did get there, what on earth could you do? Raise scaling ladders eighty feet tall? Hit the wall with a sledgehammer? Jump up and down and wave your arms and shout, "I'm tired of it all, drop bally great rocks on my head?"
The light died as clouds hid the moon. A moment later it began to rain, a fine silvery drizzle, and the fortress-monastery vanished like a castle in a dream. The soldier-monk beside him looked at his watch, hiding the luminous dial with his other hand, and murmured: "Wait. Very soon now: "
Nigel waited with an endless fund of patience, despite the damp chill that worked inward, making him conscious of his joints and the places where his bones had been broken-not more times than he could count, but more than you could tally on the fingers of one hand, too. He and the others around him were dressed in dark woolens, and armed with sword and bow, but they wore no armor, and only knitted balaclava pullover masks on their heads. This was a mission where only stealth could hope to succeed; leaving a trail of dead enemy sentries would be failure even if they made it through, since they had to be able to get out as well.
Although he strained his ears he could hear nothing; the besiegers' camp was on the northwest side of the hill, two miles distant from the crest and better than three from here, just this side of Zollner Creek along the line of the old Southern Pacific railway. They were relying on mobile patrols to keep the rest of the circuit secure, but they had to send those well out to keep beyond catapult range.